


through the walls

by lurrel



Category: Synners - Pat Cadigan
Genre: Chromatic Yuletide, F/M, Misses Clause Challenge, singularity - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurrel/pseuds/lurrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a family, sort of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	through the walls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hellkitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/gifts).



The ducks are some kinda something, Gina decides on her third day in Gabe's house. The wallpaper’s not ominous but the ducks on it aren’t particularly welcoming either. She wonders if she could turn them into something, a kids' vid or something. Gabe doesn’t have that kinda hardware, though.

He barely has any kinda hardware and Gina gets it, mostly. They'd seen some shit, for sure, but they'd got past it. And she was getting antsy, even, leaving those sockets free and unused.

She eyes the ducks as she walks over to the kitchen. They’re a trip, but Gina isn’t sure she’s ready to big C-word commitment up with a guy who can live with them staring at him for more than a month without needing to redecorate.

Or maybe that’s just an excuse she’s giving herself, because if she were honest, she’d admit that the C-word didn’t sound so bad. Getting cloned, it was like leaving an old part of Gina behind, that part of her that'd always been ruffled and searching and searching. Showing up at this old place felt like the last thing she had to find.

“You got any LotusLand here?” she asks the third night, digging through his fridge. “Hell, got any beer?”

Sam snorts at the dinner table. Kids these days have no appreciation of the finer ways to get toxed, Gina thinks. 

“I know he’s not a teetotaler,” Gina says, and Gabe laughs.

“I’ve got some wine,” he says. “I bought it at the market a little while ago.”

He rummages. The kitchen is populated with odds and ends, like a second-hand shop or the detritus of a 3D print shop. The silverware doesn’t match and the plates don’t either -- even the stuff in that hacker kid’s new place came in a set. 

“Got it,” he says, holding a bottle of red in one hand and a corkscrew in the other. “I put them away together.”

“Convenient,” Gina says, and holds out a mug for him to fill up. “So what’s keeping you from stocking up on some better recreationals?”

“Don’t normally have guests, and I’m trying to live outside of my head for a while.”

“For a while,” says Sam, glancing at the scrapheap of holo-gear in the living room.

“Well, academic work doesn’t really have a lot of headhunting potential.”

Sam’s mouth thins to a line but Gina laughs. “Those girls --”

Sam cuts her off by waving her mug. “Fill me up, Gabe.”

-

Gabe isn’t sure how to be a dad again, if he was ever a good one at all. He remembers when Sam was little and things felt less dire, and there was less porn and more programming on the dataline. 

He loves Sam, and he loves Gina, but having them both in the same house after months, probably, of solitude, feels overcrowded. He can’t shut them down when he needs to think. 

And he misses Marly, Caritha, because he can’t bring them back to talk to either. Gina brought him chips, but it’s not the same now. The women he ran through jungles with aren’t on those chips, they’ve merged and ascended into something he never wants to meet again.

He’s not going to try to meet them again, anyway.

“Hey, Gabe,” Sam says to him as he shuffles into the kitchen. She’s drinking coffee and plugged in to her insulin pump system, which has been purged of both Mark and Art and Markt and pretty much anything else, he’s been assured. She flips her sunglasses up on her forehead.

They both grin wanly at each other.

“Morning,” he says, finally, and goes to make some oatmeal. 

“How’ve you been feeling since…” She flaps her hand around and the question is earnest, a tone he doesn’t know how to associate with her.

“Fine?” He pours some coffee. “I mean, things have been fine. Especially now that I’m not at Diversifications, under everyone’s thumb. I can focus on what I like.”

“Geometry lessons?” Her eyebrows pop up. Her hair is dark and sleek like her mother’s, her skin a warm blend of brown copper, but she has his nose, his sarcastic facial tics. 

“I could do art again.” It comes out flat. He wasn’t good at it before. He doesn’t know what he’s good at now.

“I didn’t mean it like that, anyway. I mean like, how’s your head?” 

He touches one of the sockets on the back of his skull, rubs his fingers over it. “It’s fine.”

It’ll be fine.

-

Sam likes sitting outside her dad’s place. The weather is always nice, breezy with a hint of seasalt. It has the solitude of the Ozarks without the emptiness. If she screamed, someone would come running. It’s more comforting than it should be, probably.

She’s commandeered a shabby beach chair for her own, and suns for a little bit before plugging in.

Art calls sometimes. Just Art, too, not Markt. She’s not sure how that happened. In the weeks after Gina woke up, Mark woke up too and pulled himself out of Markt, leaving Art alone again, but infinitely more human than before. It’s uncanny to look at him, something in his face less teasing and more solid than before.

Mark disappeared for a little while, but his VM videos are creeping around the corners of the net, new and infused with Gina’s flairs, falls, beats, so she knows he’s fine. 

Art doesn’t sound that sure of himself when they talk so she tries to avoid him now that she’s here.

A call tone sounds.

“Sam-What-Am,” Keely says into her earbud, and she can hear the smile even without having to see his face on her sunglasses.

“Keely,” she says, smiling back. She misses him but she doesn’t miss living right on top of him at the Diz.

She thinks idly about a garden.

“You coping through family bonding okay so far?” There’s a hint of distaste there, and she doesn’t know anything about Keely’s family but if Jones is his idea of stability, well, there’s a reason he’s emancipated.

It’s not something people talk about much on the Mimosa -- your past life is ghost.

She shrugs and then says, “Let’s go to Art’s place, I want to see you.”

Art’s place is empty -- it’s mostly abandoned, now, as Art stretches himself around the dataline and chases down monsters, but it’s still full of pillows and has a nice lighting scheme that makes Keely look healthy. He waves and she sits down.

“It’s alright. No dataline here, so I’m on a neighbor’s wireless. I might be in and out.”

Keely laughs. “No dataline? Is your dad a monk now?” 

Sam almost says, “You don’t know what he’s been through,” but Keely kind of does, knows about as much as the rest of them if not more. His shirt was bloody when he showed up at the Mimosa so many months ago, after all.

“He’s afraid,” she says, because he is, “and he’s been hiding,” because she is, too.

“I get that,” Keely says, “but I don’t think I could live that cut off.” He doesn’t say ‘again’ but they both pause.

“How’s Gina?” he asks. “She seemed pretty eager to leave.”

“Loud. Gina. Real.” 

There’s another pause and Keely bites his lip.

“You tell him yet?”

She shakes her head and he frowns. “You’re gonna have to.”

“I wish he’d just stuck around so he’d just, like, know.”

“Parents.” He sounds a little sad and she wonders if they could talk about this yet.. 

 

Fez told her to think of it as something to be happy about, reuniting with her estranged parents. Family by blood was rare in their circles, but she was just feeling okay with her own carved out group, even Percy and his pals. Captain Jasm, Rosa, Gator -- everybody was teaching and sharing and everything. 

They were in a shithole, sure, but they could have moved someplace great. Keely flushed her bank account with bearer-chips from Manny Rivera’s accounts at Diversifications right before everything clicked back on-line, after all, even though no one moved out. More like everyone moved to them, with Fez consulting and Rosa running his backup.

But she likes being with Gabe, too. He feeds her, hangs out, laughs at her jokes. He’s so much less miserable than she’s used to seeing that it’s like meeting a whole different man, really, except this one used to change her diapers, too.

“Yeah,” she says.

-

“What’s it like?” Gabe asks her. It’s four in the afternoon and they’re in bed, and Gina looks at him, eyebrows raised.

“What’s what like, hotwire?” She thinks it’s an even better nickname now that he’s totally unplugged, and he smiles. She’s chipping at him, shoving her way into her life and he loves all of it, from her chipped canine to the gray that’s weaving it’s way into a few of her dreadlocks.

“Being _ecloned_. Remade.” He wonders if her electronic self has smile lines.

She pauses. She knows now that she left something back there but it wasn’t just the restless legs.

“It was different,” she offers. It’s hard to explain -- she’d rather plug in and show him. She can, too, it would be easy to pop in a wire and share everything at once, like a flower opening in fast motion.

He won’t though, she knows. He won’t even read his own damn email.

“Do you miss being plugged in?”

Ludovic swallows hard, and kisses her.

She tangles with him, lets him indulge for a minute, and then goes, “What’re you really asking?”

“Why’d you come back?”

It’s always about the meat, Gina thinks, and so she kisses him, tells him in bites and pinches and hands about why she can’t live like that, spread out over the whole world, when all she wants to do is focus hard on what’s in front of her. She can’t fall when she doesn’t exist.

-

Sam brings a laptop home, shipped to the village’s post office care of Keely care of Manny Rivera’s credit account. 

“What the hell is that?” Gabe asks. He’s reading what looks a like a paperbook and Sam can’t even begin to imagine where that came from, a fourth-hand junkshop. Even libraries don’t have them, at least not in LA. 

“It’s a laptop. I’ve been skimming wireless off your neighbor but I got Keely to send me a dataline fob to go with this thing.”

“I don’t want--”

“It won’t be your house that’s wired. It’ll just be this thing, okay? You can turn it off and unplug it at night. No one’s getting in here, okay?”

Gabe looks angry but he doesn’t say anything, so Sam lugs it into her room. There’s no ducks there, which is a little disappointing. It used to be an office, not a bedroom, so her mattress is at a weird angle but there’s a built-in desk she can drop the computer onto.

In the before times, he probably would have yelled, or at least agreed with her mother.

She fixed up the house’s wiring her second week there because it was a good way to avoid talking about Her Future, which is her dad’s second favorite subject after Gina and how great his weird life is now. But a bonus is that she can plug her computer in without killing the house’s lights.

Sam can’t think about Her Future, all caps, until she tells Gabe about his other weird life, and she doesn’t know how to do that without showing him. She doesn’t really want to think about Her Future because she only just found her Past, and she can’t even talk to that.

“Hey,” Art calls from the monitor, like he’s been waiting at her homescreen for days. 

She types hello back because she doesn’t want to talk -- voice input it too much for her right now and she’s hiding out anyway.

“I’ve got visitors,” he says, and she dutifully follows him home.

“Hey there, Sam,” Gabe says when she walks into Art’s tent. Marly and Caritha are there and wave at her. 

“Hey,” she types. “I need some advice.”

-

Gina gets Sam a sketchbook for her birthday, because she likes artists even when they’re not stone-home gods of guitar and synth, and Sam’s an artist if she ever saw one. Ludovic had it in him, once, too, so she hopes Sam works on figuring it out.

Fuck, if Gina was that young maybe she could finally start figuring it out too. Instead she just watches foodporn with Sam and learns a couple recipes. Life not on the grind has a lot of free time.

“You settling down?” Sam asks her as they chop vegetables -- real, fresh from somebody’s damn garden vegetables -- and Gina laughs.

“I don’t fucking know. I got sockets so I know I’m not done using them, but a break never hurt anybody.”

“Gabe seems settled,” Sam says and she sounds a little wary of broaching any serious topic with Gina. 

Gina waits.

“I think he’s missing something,” Sam says finally, knife on the counter, and Gina looks at her. 

“That’s not what it does,” Gina says, “It doesn’t take your whole context away.”

Sam scratches her arm, where Gator put a tattoo of vines and some other shit Gina hasn’t seen because it’s raw data and looking at raw data hurts now.

“You should talk to Mark,” Sam says. 

“What, _you_ talk to Mark?” Gina snaps. Her green peppers are totally forgotten now.

“I talked to him about this,” Sam says, jaw raised. She’s got spark, or moxy, or something, looking for a context but she’ll find it soon.

“But you can’t talk to Gabe?”

Sam deflates. It’s not like arguing with Mark or the Beater or Manny fucking Rivera, Gina thinks, because Sam’s smart. Sam’s people are waiting for her, not running away.

“I don’t think so, no.”

“It’s not as weird as you think,” Gina says, “especially since he lived half his life in a hotsuit for a few years.”

Sam’s fingers tap against the countertop and it curls into a beat in Gina’s head, thumping.

“I just think he’ll want to join, or something. Be jealous. Relapse.”

Gina shakes her head. “Nah.”

Dinner turns out okay.

-

“You can’t avoid it forever,” Gabe says when he sits down with Sam after dinner.

She’s drawing something, a house? And it’s been a while since he’s made anything with his hands so he’s not sure how she remembers how to hold a pencil.

“You managed long enough,” she says and he thinks he deserves that, at the very least.

“And look what it got me,” he says. “Eventually you’ll have to go _somewhere_.”

“You went somewhere?” 

He looks up. You can see constellations, sometimes, out where he is. Orion, at least. You don’t get that in San Francisco, where the sky looks like a drugged haze all the time.

“I didn’t. I thought I was _going_ somewhere, and then I was making body armour commercials.”

“That one was pretty rad,” Sam says, “so don’t sell yourself short.”

“I’m just saying, it’s good advice.”

“Thanks, dad.”

“You could always go to college.”

Sam bites her bottom lip. Fez mentioned it too, Rosa laughing and saying it’ll be a good way for her to put that fancy school to use.

“I don’t know what I want to _do_ ,” Sam says, because she thought she was doing it already. But now what, when the Net is something different entirely, when people can plug right in, when hackers turn into consultants. She knows how to hack but what else does she really know?

Gabe drops a hand on her shoulder, and it’s more intimate than a hug. “Just do something, okay? Promise me you’ll do something.”

-

It’s sunny the day she leaves, in an up-graded commuter rental (it has a trunk, big enough for a real suitcase and not a duffel bag). GridLid chatters at her as she plows right into the traffic, and she flips through the video stations until she hits Loophead’s new song. There’s not video feed but it’s okay.

Sam calls home, because it’s home, about five miles out. Her dad sounds sad, and then resigned, and then excited, all in the span of about four minutes. She’s going back to the Diz, but it’ll only be a short stop too, she knows.

She knows because she’s going somewhere.

"Whack on it," Sam says over the phone, and she hears Gina flip the monitor on.

“There’s a couple people you guys should meet.”

She can’t see it but she knows Gabe on screen probably waves at Gabe in the living room. He’s not a clone, not like Gina, but he’s there, assembled from Marly and Caritha’s memories. They built him just like he built them. Gina’s eclone is something else, and they’re all alive, as alive as you can be without the meat.

It’s pretty alive, she thinks, even if she wants to stay alive a different way.

“Sam,” Gabe says, softly, after a flurry of a conversation happened in the background.

“I’ll see you at Christmas,” she says, because she has to go home, has a home to go to. She’s gonna miss the ducks while she’s gone.


End file.
